After a two-week hiatus, ABC’s show about the brilliant detective called “Will Trent” dropped its ninth episode today, and it featured Trent’s partner Faith Mitchell being kidnapped by a convict charged with murdering a cop. Not too long ago, Trent himself had been considered kidnapped by a group of Neo-Nazis, and now it was his partner’s turn to find herself hostage. We’re also reminded in the recap that Angie Polaski was sexually abused in her foster home, which becomes an important theme for this episode. Here’s what happens when Faith gets kidnapped in this episode and why Angie doesn’t open up to her boyfriend Trent about her abuser.
Spoilers Ahead
Faith’s Kidnapping
In front of a court buzzing with protestors and picketers shouting “Justice for Andrew,” a criminal named Sam LaPorte is brought in for murdering a cop named Andrew Hollis. As Andrew’s partner, Officer Tate, and Michael Ormewood await inside the lobby, LaPorte is brought in in cuffs and, amidst a scuffle, manages to pick up a hair clip. In the ladies washroom, Faith is testing her blood sugar when an elderly woman named Bonnie arrives, and the two are chatting when gunshots are heard. As Faith tries to calm Bonnie, she notices her phone has no service, so she can’t call for help.
A brilliant dyslexic detective Will Trent is shopping in the department store with his dog Betty and her caretaker Nico when he learns that Nico has opened an Instagram account for Betty. Trent gets a phone call that tells him shots have been fired at the courthouse, and upon learning his partner Faith Mitchell was supposed to be stationed there for the day; he heads to the scene. Upon arriving at the court, Trent meets Ormewood and Officer Tate Grillo, who inform Trent of the current situation and that LaPorte, who is guilty of murdering Tate’s partner, has snatched a gun from an officer. As Faith and Bonnie are leaving the washroom, they come face-to-face with the suspect, Sam LaPorte, who points his gun at Faith. By the time Trent and the other cops show up, Bonnie is in the corner hyperventilating, and Trent finds a handbag with Faith’s ID inside it. Bonnie tells the cops that the man took Faith hostage and also snatched the old woman’s car keys.
Angie Meets A Monster
Faith drives LaPorte away from the courthouse in Bonnie’s car while being held at gunpoint, and she tells him about her son Jeremy, and that she’d drive him anywhere he wants if it means she can see her son again. She also asks him to stop because she needs her insulin. The car is seen parked outside a pharmacy, and inside the trunk, Faith is struggling to get out of her cuffs and escape from her confinement. After a lot of strenuous postures, she manages to unlock the trunk, but LaPorte arrives right at that moment, and even though Faith tries running away, he points a gun at her and forces her to get into a different car. By the time Trent looks into the car LaPorte fled the courthouse in, it’s lying abandoned outside the pharmacy, and based on the scratches inside; he can picture his partner struggling to free herself. Meanwhile, Officer Tate is announcing to the force that LaPorte has escaped in a Ford F-150 truck, but Trent knows that’s one of the most common trucks in Georgia, so it’ll be a lot more difficult to catch LaPorte based on that information alone. He tells his superior, Amanda Wagner, that he learned from the pharmacist that LaPorte had stolen insulin from the store, meaning he didn’t want Faith to die just yet, and the detective decided to find out about the suspect’s background.
Elsewhere, Ormewood and Angie Polaski are camped outside LaPorte’s mom’s house so that they can nab him the moment he shows up. Ormewood tells Angie about his colleague Andrew Hollis, who was with Ormewood during the academy, and says that Hollis was a great guy who’d have made captain if he had lived. Hollis decided to hire LaPorte, an ex-con, and he got murdered for it. While waiting for their target, Angie ends up spotting the one person she’d rather not lay eyes on for the rest of her life. It was none other than her foster dad who had sexually assaulted her, which ended with her getting pregnant. Angie exclaims, “That’s him,” and Ormewood thinks she spotted LaPorte, but he finds Angie visibly disturbed. In an AA meeting, Angie informs the group that she’s been sober for 81 days and she’s having a tough day today because she encountered someone whom she never had hoped to see ever again.
All’s Not What It Seems
LaPorte is making Faith walk into a house, and she refuses to proceed unless he tells her where they’re going. The convict says they’re to head into his friend Glen’s house, but Faith starts screaming, so LaPorte has to tell her that he’s innocent and that he was with Glen the night Hollis was murdered. When they enter, LaPorte goes upstairs to look for his friend, while Faith enters the disheveled living room to find Glen unconscious with blood on his face, and she puts a pillow on his chest to stave off the bleeding while calling after Sam LaPorte. Suddenly, Officer Tate Grillo arrives, and Faith tells him that Glen has a pulse, but he needs help, and sudednly he shoots Glen in the head, killing him, and then alerts the dispatch of their location and that Glen Donato has been killed by GBI Agent Faith Mitchell. Sam walks in with his gun aimed at Grillo and says he’s the one who framed Sam for the murder of Hollis, so the corrupt cop proceeds to inform the dispatch that LaPorte has been located as well and that he and Faith are in cahoots. She immediately jumps at him and starts strangling him with her handcuffs, and by the time he passes out, the police have already arrived. Faith wants to stay and explain, but Sam says they need to escape lest they’re shot on sight.
At the GBI, Director Armstrong, along with Trent and Amanda, listen to Tate’s distress call to the dispatch, naming Faith as the partner to LaPorte, and the Director says that ballistics confirm that the bullet was fired from Faith’s gun and the forensics found her coat at the scene of the crime, but Amanda argues Faith has never fired the gun previously. However, the Director refuses to listen and threatens to pull Trent from the case based on the fact that he’s her partner. He also adds that Faith and LaPorte have known each other since she arrested him seven years ago for shoplifting. The Director leaves with the knowledge that unless Sam LaPorte and Faith Mitchell are brought into custody at the earliest, he’ll hand the case to someone who can. While driving away, Faith tells LaPorte she needs to contact Trent, but they don’t have any phones, plus all his communication networks are probably being monitored. Moreover, the names of Faith and Sam are declared over the radio, along with the model of the car they were last seen in. They stop outside a gas station, and as LaPorte goes in, another car stops next to theirs, and the mom goes into the shop as her son stays in the car. Faith cleans off some of the blood on her face and then approaches the kid and offers to show him her friend’s dog’s Instagram. She sends a voice message to Nico in the Instagram account for Betty from the kid’s phone and asks them to tell Trent that she’s safe, she didn’t kill anyone, and she had left her gun at the courthouse. The kid’s mom rushes out after seeing Faith talking to her son, and the two fugitives have to flee immediately.
Trent and Ormewood arrive at Glen Donato’s place, and looking at the bloodstains on the pillow, Ormewood asks how the blood came to be on it, but Tate’s answer sounds sketchy. Trent questions the cop about why Faith didn’t finish the job with him if she did kill Glen. He asks where Ormewood’s partner Angie is and then tells Tate that the mark on his neck looks like ligature marks when the officer tells the detective that Faith tried strangling him. Ormewood leads Trent out because this case isn’t in his jurisdiction, where the detective tells the ex-army man that the crime scene is staged and Faith is being framed. She was in handcuffs when she came in; her gun was on the floor. If she had indeed killed Glen, she’d have shot Tate, too, instead of strangling him. Ormewood goes back inside, his curiosity piqued about the whole situation, and Trent gets a call from Nico, who tells him of Faith’s message, and he already knows what it means.
Faith and Sam enter a cabin he knew of, and inside, he tells her that she had arrested him at Best Buy in 2016. She goes into the shower after handcuffing him to a fridge, and he immediately begins trying to pick the lock once she’s out of sight. At the GBI, Ormewood approaches Trent and tells him that based on the forensics done on the pillow, it revealed the blood was transfer stains—Faith had held it to Glen’s chest to stave the bleeding. Trent asks if Ormewood would be interested in meeting Andrew Hollis’ widow at Trent’s place, and the cop agrees to join him. Maia Hollis walks in and immediately wants to leave when she spots Ormewood. Trent calms her down, and Maia says Andrew likes Sam LaPorte, but she wasn’t allowed to testify, and Tate handled everything, keeping Maia out of sight. Ormewood said he wanted to check on her, but Tate had told everyone that she had refused to meet anyone, controlling the narrative. Trent asks for further information, and she finally gives in and says her husband was an honest cop and he knew Tate was dirty, which is why he began arranging a file with evidence to submit to Internal Affairs, but she doesn’t know where he kept it. She adds that Andrew was planting bamboo in the backyard, and within two weeks of starting it, he was murdered, and she moved after his death. Maia adds that, apart from being corrupt, Tate Grillo is a sociopath. When Faith steps out of the shower, she finds Sam trying to escape, so she has to fire a warning shot before cuffing his arm and leg to stop him from fleeing. Faith slouches down on the couch after saying she just has one more bullet in her gun now.
Men At Work
Angie asks Ormewood to run the details on a man named Lenny Broussard and says she can’t do it herself, adding that she was in his foster care for a while, and it was not good. Trent watches the recording of Sam’s interrogation, where he tells Tate that on the night of Andrew’s death, he was with his friend Glen, and they were replacing bamboo with rose bushes when Faith’s son Jeremy walks in. He asks Trent if he thinks his mother could actually be involved, but her partner denies, and Amanda arrives to inform the kid that the pizza is here to get him out of Trent’s office. She asks him about the plan, and he says it’s best if Amanda is kept in the dark. Trent and Ormewood go into Andrew’s old house with shovels and begin digging underneath the bamboo bushes because that’s what the cop was working on before he got murdered. While digging in the ground, Trent strikes something metallic, and together, they fish out a box. Back at the GBI, an officer tells Angie that there’s a man in the interrogation room waiting to be questioned, and Angie goes to face her abuser. The man, Lenny, who spent 12 years in jail, apologizes profusely for all the crimes he committed against her and says he wanted to rectify his mistakes, but even after writing and rewriting a letter he wanted to send her, he still doesn’t know what to say to her at the moment. She realizes she can’t continue talking to her abuser because she’s not sure if she can trust that he’s a changed man. A few minutes later, Angie’s confusion is shattered when she sees two young women take Lenny home, one of them being his wife and the other supposedly another girl in his foster care. She sees Lenny put his hand on the young girl’s waist, and she realizes that all of that apology in the interrogation room was a show, and he’s still a monster.
Faith Serves Justice
Ormewood breaks open the box he and Trent found with his shovel, and it contains detailed evidence of every time Tate stole, along with dated pictures. Ormewood notes that the evidence points towards stolen weapons, contraband, and cash as Trent gets a call from Amanda that a woman alerted the cops about two people matching the descriptions of Faith and LaPorte, and they need to head to a resort community in Pickens immediately before anyone attacks Faith. Trent tells her that they’ve found sufficient proof to establish that Tate was dirty and to reopen the case, and she asks for the evidence immediately. Ormewood asks Trent to go save his partner while he’ll ensure the evidence reaches Amanda. At the resort, Sam and Faith are cooking, and it seems they’ve begun getting along with each other when a cop car arrives outside, and a bullet shatters a window. As Faith and Sam lie on the floor, Tate asks Faith to give up Sam lest she wants him to throw grenades into the resort. She asks him to stay put and gets up to go outside, and he kisses her. Faith sneaks out and tries flanking Tate, but he begins firing at her, and she’s unable to counter because she has just one bullet left. Realizing the situation Faith is in, Sam leaps out and starts scuffling with Tate, and Faith has to gather all her skills and concentration to take aim and fire the only bullet she has. Thankfully, it hits Tate squarely in the forehead, and Sam is safe, but immediately other cops arrive, and the two have to surrender.
In the morning, Amanda arrives at the scene and is freeing Faith when an officer objects, so she informs him that the GBI and Det. Ormewood helped recover stolen guns and weapons—including the one used to murder Hollis—from a storage unit that Tate Grillo was renting. Faith defended herself by shooting the criminal Tate, and she should be free to go. They see Tate’s body bag, and Faith apologizes, but Amanda tells her that she did nothing wrong. Trent meets her, and he’s glad that his partner is okay. Later, Faith visits Sam and informs him that his conviction on the charge of murdering Andrew Hollis is overturned, but he still has to face several charges, although she promises to put in a good word with the DA for him. At Trent’s house, he arrives to find Angie cooking and spots an empty bottle of non-alcoholic brew in the trash. He asks her what’s been bothering her, and she thinks about opening up, but on second thought, she says she just had a long day at work and leaves it at that.
‘Will Trent’ Episode 9: Ending Explained – Why Did Angie Not Will Tell Trent About Her Abuser?
When Angie spotted her abuser suddenly while waiting for a suspect to show up, immediately all the trauma from when she was 15 came swirling back to her. She had him picked up for questioning, but upon seeing her, Lenny pretended that he was a saintly man who hated his actions every day and that he apologized profusely for the same. The reason Angie decided not to share the event of her encounter with Lenny was that she knew he’d either try to seek justice for her or go after him, and she didn’t want her name to be associated with the case. She was worried that her career and reputation might come under fire if people learned of her past, which is why she wanted to keep things hush-hush. Additionally, it’s also possible that secretly Angie is planning vengeance on the monster who tried ruining her life and is on the way to ruin one more girl, and if she divulges her plans to Trent, he’ll try to stop her, which is why she chose to remain silent. To know her actual intentions, we’ll have to wait until Episode 10 comes out.
